“Panegyric means more than eulogy. Eulogy no
doubt includes praise of the person, but it does not exclude a
certain criticism, a certain blame. Panegyric involves neither blame
nor criticism.”

LITTRÉ, Dictionnaire de la langue
française.

“Why ask my lineage? The
generations of men are like those of leaves. The wind casts the
leaves to the ground, but the fertile forest brings forth others, and
spring comes round again. So it is that the human race is born and
passes away.”

Iliad, Canto VI.

I

“As for
his plan, we profess to be able to demonstrate that there is no such
thing, that he writes almost at random, mixing up facts, reporting
them incoherently and out of order; confounding, when he treats of
one era, that which pertains to another; disdaining to justify either
his accusations or his eulogies; adopting without examination and the
critical spirit so necessary to a historian the false judgements of
prejudice, rivalry or enmity, and the exaggerations of ill humour or
malevolence; attributing to some people actions and to others
speeches that are incompatible with their characters; never citing
any witness but himself or any other authority but his own
assertions.”

ALL MY LIFEI have
seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense
destruction; I have joined in these troubles. Such circumstances
would no doubt suffice to prevent the most transparent of my acts or
thoughts from ever being universally approved. But, I do believe,
several of them could have been misunderstood.

Clausewitz, at the beginning of his
history of the campaign of 1815, gives this summary of his method:
“In every strategical critique, the essential thing is to put oneself
exactly in the position of the actors; it is true that this is often
very difficult.” The difficult thing is to know “all the
circumstances in which the actors find themselves” at a given moment,
in order to be in position to judge soundly the series of their
choices in the conduct of their war: how they accomplished what they
did and what they might have been able to do differently. So, above
all, it is necessary to know what they wanted and, of course, what
they believed; without forgetting what they were ignorant of. And
what they were ignorant of was not only the result still to come of
their own operations colliding with the operations that were opposed
to them, but also much of what was even then making its weight felt
against them, in the disposition or strength of the enemy camp —
which, however, remained hidden from them. And basically they did not
know the exact value they should place on their own forces, until
these forces could make their value known precisely at the moment of
their employment — whose issue, moreover, sometimes changes that
value just as much as it tests it.

A person who has led an action, the
great consequences of which were felt at a distance, has often been
nearly alone in his knowledge of some rather important aspects, which
diverse reasons have encouraged him to keep hidden, while other
aspects have since been forgotten, simply because those times have
passed or the people who knew them are dead. And the testimony even
of the living is not always accessible. If one person does not really
know how to write, another is constrained by more current interests
or ambitions, a third could be afraid, and the last risks burdening
himself with the worry of protecting his own reputation. As will be
seen, I am not hindered by any of these obstacles. Speaking then as
coolly as possible about things that have aroused so much passion, I
am going to say what I have done. Assuredly, a great many — if not
all — unjust rebukes will find themselves at that moment swept away
like dust. And I am convinced that the broad lines of the history of
my times will stand out more clearly.

I will be compelled to go into some
details. That could take me rather a long way; I do not deny the
magnitude of the task. I will take whatever time is necessary. Even
so, I will not say, as Sterne did when beginning to write
Tristram
Shandy, that I will “go on
leisurely, writing and publishing two volumes of my life every year
. . . if I am suffered to go on quietly, and can make a
tolerable bargain with my bookseller.” For I surely do not want to
commit myself to publishing two volumes a year or even promise any
less precipitous rhythm.

My method will be very simple. I will
tell of what I have loved; and, in this light, everything else will
become evident and make itself well enough understood.

“Deceitful time hides its traces from
us, but it goes by, quickly,” says the poet Li Po, who adds: “Perhaps
you still retain the cheerfulness of youth — but your hair is already
white; and what is the use of complaining?” I don’t intend to
complain about anything, and certainly not about the way I have been
able to live.

Much less do I wish to hide its
traces, when I know them to be exemplary. It has always been rare for
someone to set out to say exactly what the life he has known really
was, because of the subject’s many difficulties. And this will be
perhaps even more invaluable at present, in an era when so many
things have changed at the astounding speed of catastrophes; in an
era about which one can say that almost every point of reference and
measure has suddenly been swept away, along with the very ground on
which the old society was built.

In any case, it is easy for me to be
sincere. I find nothing that can cause me the least embarrassment on
any subject. I have never believed in the received values of my
contemporaries, and today no one takes cognizance of any of them any
more. Lacenaire, perhaps still too scrupulous, exaggerated, it seems
to me, the responsibility he had directly incurred in the violent
deaths of a very small number of people: “Even with the blood that
covers me, I think I’m worth more than most of the men I’ve met,” he
wrote to Jacques Arago. (“But you were there with us, Monsieur Arago,
on the barricades in 1832. Remember the Cloître
Saint-Merry. . . . You don’t know what poverty is,
Monsieur Arago.You’ve never been hungry,” the workers on the
June 1848 barricades soon answered not him but his brother, who
had come like a Roman to harangue them on the injustice of rebelling
against the laws of the Republic.)

There is nothing more natural than to
consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the centre of
the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world
without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter. One has only to
mark off the precise limits that necessarily restrain this authority:
its proper place in the course of time and in society; what one has
done and what one has known, one’s dominant passions. “Who then can
write the truth, if not those who have felt it?” The author of the
most beautiful Memoirs of the seventeenth century, who has not
escaped the inept reproach of having spoken of his conduct without
maintaining the appearance of the coldest objectivity, made an apt
observation concerning truth: in the quotation above, he supported
the opinion of the Président de Thou, according to whom “the
only true histories are those that have been written by men who have
been sincere enough to speak truly about themselves.”

One might be surprised that I
implicitly seem to compare myself, here and there, on a point of
detail, with some great mind of the past or simply with personalities
who have been noted historically. One would be wrong. I do not claim
to resemble any other person, and I believe that the present era is
hardly comparable to the past. But many figures from the past, in all
their extreme diversity, are still quite commonly known. They
represent, in brief, a readily accessible index of human behaviour or
propensities. Those who do not know who they were can easily find
out; and the ability to make oneself understood is always a virtue in
a writer.

I will have to make rather extensive
use of quotations — never, I believe, to lend authority to a
particular argument, but only to show fully of what stuff this
adventure and myself are made. Quotations are useful in periods of
ignorance or obscurantist beliefs. Allusions, without quotation
marks, to other texts that one knows to be very famous, as in
classical Chinese poetry, Shakespeare, and Lautréamont, should
be reserved for times richer in minds capable of recognizing the
original phrase and the distance its new application has introduced.
Today, when irony itself is not always understood, there is the risk
of the phrase being confidently attributed to oneself — and,
moreover, being hastily and incorrectly reproduced. The antique
ponderousness of exact quotations will be compensated for, I hope, by
the quality of the selection. They will appear when appropriate in
this text; no computer could have provided me with this pertinent
variety.

Those who wish to write quickly a
piece about nothing that no one will read through even once, whether
in a newspaper or a book, extol with much conviction the style of the
spoken language, because they find it much more modern, direct,
facile. They themselves do not know how to speak. Neither do their
readers, the language actually spoken under modern conditions of life
being socially reduced to its indirect representation through the
suffrage of the media, and including around six or eight turns of
phrase repeated at every moment and fewer than two hundred words,
most of them neologisms, with the whole thing submitted to
replacement by one third every six months. All this favours a certain
rapid solidarity. On the contrary, I for my part am going to write
without affectation or fatigue, as if it were the most natural and
easiest thing in the world, the language that I have learned and, in
most circumstances, spoken. It’s not up to me to change it. The
Gypsies rightly contend that one is never compelled to speak the
truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language, the lie
must reign. Another advantage: by referring to the vast corpus of
classical texts that have appeared in French throughout the five
centuries before my birth, but especially in the last two, it will
always be easy to translate me adequately into any future idiom, even
when French has become a dead language.

Who, in our century, could not be
aware that he who finds it in his interest instantly to affirm
whatever he is told will care nothing for how he tells it. The
immense growth in the means of modern domination has so marked the
style of its pronouncements that if the understanding of the progress
of the sombre reasoning of power was for a long time a privilege of
people of real intelligence, it has now inevitably become familiar to
even the most dull-witted. It is in this sense that the truth of this
report on my times will be rather well proved by its style. The tone
of this text will in itself be sufficient guarantee, for everyone
will understand that it is only by dint of having lived in such a way
that one can have the expertise for this kind of account.

It is known for certain that the
Peloponnesian War took place. But it is only through Thucydides that
we know of its implacable development and its lessons. No
cross-checking is possible; but neither was it necessary, because the
veracity of the facts, like the coherence of the thought, was so well
imposed on his contemporaries and near posterity that any other
witness felt discouraged when faced with the difficulty of
introducing a different interpretation of the events, or even
quibbling over a detail.

And I believe one will likewise have
to rest content with that in the history I am now going to present.
For no one, for a long time to come, will have the audacity to
undertake to demonstrate, on any aspect, the contrary of what I will
say, whether it is a matter of finding the slightest inexact element
in the facts or of maintaining another point of view on the
subject.

Conventional as this procedure might
be judged, I think that here it is not useless first of all to sketch
out clearly the beginning: the date and the general conditions under
which began a story that I will not fail to abandon subsequently to
all the confusion demanded by its theme. It may reasonably be thought
that many things appear in youth, which stay with you for a long
time. I was born in 1931, in Paris. My family’s fortune was at that
time shattered by the consequences of the world economic crisis that
had first appeared in America a little earlier; and the remnants did
not seem capable of lasting much beyond my majority, which is what in
fact happened. So, then, I was born virtually ruined. I was not,
properly speaking, ignorant of the fact that I should not expect an
inheritance, and in the end I did not receive one. I simply did not
grant the slightest importance to those rather abstract questions
about the future. Thus, throughout the course of my adolescence, if I
went slowly but inevitably towards a life of adventure, with my eyes
open, it can none the less be said that I had my eyes open then on
this question, as well as on most others. I could not even think of
studying for one of the learned professions that lead to holding down
a job, for all of them seemed completely alien to my tastes or
contrary to my opinions. The people I respected more than anyone
alive were Arthur Cravan and Lautréamont, and I knew perfectly
well that all their friends, if I had consented to pursue university
studies, would have scorned me as much as if I had resigned myself to
exercising an artistic activity; and if I could not have those
friends, I certainly would not stoop to consoling myself with others.
A doctor of nothing, I have firmly kept myself apart from all
semblance of participation in the circles that then passed for
intellectual or artistic. I admit that my merit in this respect was
well tempered by my great laziness, as well as by my very meagre
capacities for confronting the work of such careers.

Never to have given more than very
slight attention to questions of money, and absolutely no place to
the ambition of holding some brilliant function in society, is a
trait so rare among my contemporaries that it will no doubt sometimes
be considered unbelievable, even in my case. It is, however, true,
and it has been so constantly and perpetually verifiable that the
public will just have to get used to it. I imagine that the cause
resided in my devil-may-care upbringing encountering favourable
terrain. I never saw bourgeois at work, with the baseness that their
special kind of work inevitably entails; and there perhaps is the
reason why in this indifference I could learn something good about
life, but, all told, solely through absence and lack. The moment of
decadence of any form of social superiority is surely rather more
amenable than its vulgar beginnings. I remain attached to this
preference, which I felt very early on, and I can say that poverty
has principally given me a great deal of leisure, not having ruined
properties to manage and not dreaming of restoring them through
participation in the government of the state. It is true that I have
tasted pleasures little known to people who have obeyed the
unfortunate laws of this era. It is also true that I have strictly
observed several duties of which they have not the slightest idea.
“For you see nothing but the external appearance of our life,” the
Rule of the
Temple stated bluntly in its
time, “but you do not know the severe commandments within.” I should
also note, to cite all the favourable influences met there, the
obvious fact that I had occasion then to read several good books,
from which it is always possible to find by oneself all the others,
or even to write those that are still lacking. This quite complete
statement will stop here.

Before the age of twenty, I saw the
peaceful part of my youth come to an end; and I now had nothing left
except the obligation to pursue all my tastes without restraint,
though in difficult conditions. I headed first towards that very
attractive milieu where an extreme nihilism no longer wanted to know
about nor, above all, continue what had previously been considered
the use of life or the arts. This milieu had no trouble recognizing
me as one of its own. There my last possibilities of one day
returning to the normal round of existence disappeared. I thought so
then, and what came after proved it.

It must be that I am less inclined
than others to calculate, since the choice made so quickly, which
committed me to so much, was spontaneous, the product of a
thoughtlessness on which I have never gone back; and which later,
having had the leisure in which to judge the consequences, I have
never regretted. It could easily be said that in terms of wealth or
reputation I have never had anything to lose; but, finally, neither
have I had anything to gain.

This milieu of demolition experts,
more clearly than its precursors of the two or three preceding
generations, was then entirely mixed up with the dangerous classes.
Living with them, one for the most part lived their life. Lingering
traces obviously remain. Over the years, more than half the people I
knew well had sojourned one or several times in the prisons of
various countries; many, no doubt, for political reasons, but all the
same a greater number for common-law offences or crimes. So I met
mainly rebels and the poor. I saw around me a great many individuals
who died young, and not always by suicide, frequent as that was. On
the matter of violent death, I will note, without being able to put
forward a fully rational explanation of the phenomenon, that the
number of my friends who have been killed by bullets constitutes an
uncommonly high percentage — leaving aside military operations, of
course.

Our only public actions, which
remained rare and brief in the first years, were meant to be
completely unacceptable: at first, especially by their form; later,
as they acquired depth, especially by their content. They were not
accepted. “Destruction was my Béatrice,” wrote
Mallarmé, who himself was the guide for a few others in rather
perilous explorations. For it is quite certain that whoever devotes
himself to making such historical demonstrations, and thus refuses
all existing work, will have to know how to live off the land. I will
discuss the question in more detail later on. Confining myself here
to presenting the subject as its most general, I will say that I have
always been content to give the vague impression that I had great
intellectual, even artistic qualities of which I preferred to deprive
my era, which did not seem to merit their use. There have always been
people to regret my absence and, paradoxically, to help me maintain
it. If this has turned out well it is only because I never went
looking for anyone, anywhere. My entourage has been composed only of
those who came of their own accord and knew how to make themselves
accepted. I wonder if even one other person has dared to behave like
me, in this era. It must also be acknowledged that the degradation of
all existing conditions appeared at precisely the same moment, as if
to justify my singular folly.

I must likewise admit — for nothing
can remain purely unalterable in the course of time — that after some
twenty years, or a little more, an advanced fraction of a specialized
public has seemed to begin no longer to completely reject the idea
that I could well have several real talents, which are especially
remarkable in comparison with the great poverty of the stray thoughts
and useless repetitions that these people have for a long time
believed they had to admire; and even though the only discernible use
of my gifts ought to be regarded as entirely nefarious. And then of
course it was I who refused to agree, in any way, to recognise the
existence of these people who were beginning, so to speak, to
recognize something of mine. It is true that they were not ready to
accept everything, and I have always said frankly that it would be
all or nothing, thus placing myself definitively out of reach of
their possible concessions. As for society, my tastes and ideas have
not changed, remaining as strictly opposed to what it was as to all
that it claimed to want to be.

The leopard dies with his spots, and
I have never intended, or believed myself capable of, improving
myself. I have really never aspired to any sort of virtue, except
perhaps that of having thought that only some crimes of a new type,
which could certainly not have been cited in the past, might not be
unworthy of me; and that of not having changed, after such a bad
start. At a critical moment in the troubles of the Fronde, Gondi, who
had given such sterling proofs of his capacities in the handling of
human affairs — notably in his favourite role of disturber of the
public peace — improvised happily before the Parlement de Paris a
beautiful quotation attributed to an ancient author, whose name
everyone vainly searched for, but which could be best applied to his
own panegyric: “In
difficillimis Reipublicae temporibus, urbem non deserui; in prosperis
nihil de publico delibavi; in desperatis, nihil
timui.” He himself translated
it as “In bad times, I did not abandon the city; in good times, I had
no private interests; in desperate times, I feared nothing.”

II

“Such were
the events of that winter, and thus ended the second year of the war
of which Thucydides has written the history.”

THUCYDIDES,
The Peloponnesian
War.

IN THE ZONEof
perditionwhere my youth went as if to complete its
education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent
collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an
appointment. Permanently ensconced ther were people who could be
defined only negatively, for the good reason that they had no job,
followed no course of study, and practised no art. Many of them had
participated in the recent wars, in several of the armies that had
fought over the continent: the German, the French, the Russian, the
American, the two Spanish armies, and several others. The remainder,
who were five or six years younger, had come there directly, because
the idea of the family had begun to dissolve, like all others. No
received doctrine moderated anyone’s conduct, much less offered his
existence any illusory goal. Diverse practices of the moment were
always ready to present, against all evidence, their cool defence.
Nihilism is quick to moralize, as soon as it is touched by the idea
of justifying itself: one man robbed banks and gloried in not robbing
the poor, while another had never killed anyone when he was not
angry. Despite all the eloquence at their disposal, they were the
most unpredictable people from one hour to the next, and they were
occasionally rather dangerous. It is the fact of having passed
through such a milieu that permitted me to say later, with the same
pride as the demagogue in Aristophanes’ Knights: “I too grew up in the streets!”

After all, it was modern poetry, for
the last hundred years, that had led us there. We were a handful who
thought that it was necessary to carry out its programme in reality,
and in any case to do nothing else. It is sometimes surprising — to
tell the truth, only since an extremely recent date — to
discover the atmosphere of hate and malediction that has constantly
surrounded me and, as much as possible, kept me hidden. Some think
that it is because of the grave responsibility that has often been
attributed to me for the origins, or even for the command, of the
May 1968 revolt. I think rather that it is what I did in 1952
that has been disliked for so long. An angry queen of France once
called to order the most seditious of her subjects: “There is
rebellion in imagining that one could rebel.”

That is just what happened. Another,
earlier contemner of the world, who said that he had been a king in
Jerusalem, had touched on the heart of the problem, almost with these
very words: The spirit whirls in all directions, and on its circuits
the spirit returns. All revolutions go down in history, yet history
does not fill up; the rivers of revolution return from whence they
came, only to flow again.

There have always been artists or
poets capable of living in violence. The impatient Marlowe died,
knife in hand, arguing over a bill. It is generally thought that
Shakespeare was thinking of the death of his rival when he made,
without too much fear of being reproached for heavyhandedness, this
joke in As You Like
It: “it strikes a man more
dead than a great reckoning in a little room.” The phenomenon that is
absolutely new this time, and has naturally left few traces, is that
the sole principle admitted by all was that there could precisely no
longer be either poetry or art, and that something better had to be
found.

We had several points of resemblance
with those other devotees of the dangerous life who had spent their
time, exactly five hundred years before us, in the same city and on
the same side of the river. Obviously, I cannot be compared to anyone
who has mastered his art like François Villon. And I was not
as irremediably engaged as he in organized crime; after all, I had
not studied so hard at university. But there had been that “noble
man” among my friends who was the complete equal of Régnier de
Montigny, as well as many other rebels destined for bad ends; and
there were the pleasures and splendour of those lost young hoodlum
girls who kept us such good company in our dives and could not have
been that different from the girls others had known under the names
of Marion l’Idole or Catherine, Biétrix and Bellet. I will
speak of what we were then in the argot of Villon’s accomplices,
which is certainly no longer an impenetrable secret language. On the
contrary, it is generally accessible to the well informed. But thus
will I put the inevitable criminological dimension into a reassuring
philological distance:

[There I met a few heads the
executioner was waiting for: thieves and murderers. They were
accomplices one could be proud of, for they never hesitated when it
came to resorting to force. They were often picked up by the police,
but they were good at feigning innocence and misleading them. That’s
where I learned how to deceive interrogators, so that for a long time
after, and here too, I’d rather remain silent about such business.
Our acts of violence and our earthly delights are past. Yet I vividly
recall my penniless comrades who understood so well this delusory
world: when we met in our hangouts, in Paris at night.]

I pride myself on having neither
forgotten nor learnt anything in this regard. There were cold streets
and snow, and the river in flood: “In the middle of the bed/the river
is deep.” There were the girls who had skipped school, with their
proud eyes and sweet lips; the frequent police searches; the roar of
the cataract of time. “Never again will we drink so young.”

It could be said that I have always
loved foreign women. From Hungary and Spain, from China and Germany,
from Russia and Italy came those who filled my youth with joy. And
later, when I already had grey hair, I lost the little reason that
through the course of time I had, with great difficulty, succeeded in
acquiring, for a girl from Córdoba. Omar
Kháyyám, having given the matter some thought, had to
admit: “Indeed the Idols I have loved so long/Have done my credit in
this World much wrong:/Have drowned my Glory in a shallow Cup,/And
sold my Reputation for a song.” Who better than I could feel the
justice of this observation? But also, who more than I has scorned
all the valuations of my era and the reputations it awarded? The
result was already contained in the beginning of this journey.

That took place between the autumn of
1952 and the spring of 1953, in Paris, south of the Seine and north
of the rue de Vaugirard, east of the carrefour de la Croix-Rouge, and
west of the rue Dauphine. Archilochus wrote “Come, go then with a cup
. . . draw drink from the hollow tuns, draining the red
wine to the lees; for we no more than other men can stay sober on
this watch.”

Between the rue du Four and the rue
de Buci, where our youth so completely went astray as a few glasses
were drunk, one could feel certain that we would never do any
better.

III

“I have observed that most of those who have
left memoirs have clearly shown us their bad actions or their
penchants only when, by chance, they have taken them for feats or
good instincts, which occasionally has happened.”

ALEXIS DETOCQUEVILLE, Souvenirs.

AFTER THE CIRCUMSTANCESthat I
have just recalled, it is no doubt the quickly acquired habit of
drinking that has marked my entire life. Wines, spirits and beers:
the moments when some of them became essential and the moments when
they returned have traced out the main course and meanders of days,
weeks and years. Two or three other passions, which I will talk
about, have almost continually taken up a lot of space in this life.
But drinking has been the most constant and the most present. Among
the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do
well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is drink. Even
though I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much
less than most people who write; but I have drunk much more than most
people who drink. I can count myself among those of whom Baltasar
Gracián, thinking about an elite distinguishable only among
the Germans — but here very unfair, to the detriment of the French,
as I think I have shown — could say: “There are those who have got
drunk only once, but it has lasted them a lifetime.”

Furthermore, I am a little surprised
— I who have had to read so often the most extravagant calumnies or
unjust criticisms of myself — to see that a total of thirty years or
more have passed without some malcontent ever instancing my
drunkenness as an argument, at least implicitly, against my
scandalous ideas — with the one, belated exception of a piece by some
drug addicts in England who revealed around 1980 that I was destroyed
by alcohol and had thus ceased to be harmful. I never dreamed for an
instant of hiding this perhaps questionable side of my personality,
and it was there beyond doubt for all those who met me more than once
or twice. I can even note that it has sufficed me on each occasion a
rather few days in order to be highly regarded, in Venice as in
Cadiz, and in Hamburg as in Lisbon, by the people I have met only by
frequenting certain cafés.

First, like everyone, I appreciated
the effect of slight drunkenness; then very soon I grew to like what
lies beyond violent drunkenness, when one has passed that stage: a
magnificent and terrible peace, the true taste of the passage of
time. Although in the first decades I may have allowed only slight
indications to appear once or twice a week, it is a fact that I have
been continuously drunk for periods of several months; and the rest
of the time, I still drank a lot.

An air of disorder in the great
variety of emptied bottles nevertheless remains susceptible to an a
posteriori classification. First, I can distinguish between the
drinks I consumed in their countries of origin and those I consumed
in Paris; but almost everything there was to drink was to be had in
Paris in the middle of the century. Everywhere, the premises can be
subdivided simply between what I drank at home, or at friends’, or in
cafés, cellars, bars, restaurants, or in the streets, notably
on café terraces.

The hours and their shifting
conditions almost always retain a determining role in the necessary
renewal of the moments of a spree, and each brings its sensible
preference to bear on the available possibilities. There is what is
drunk in the mornings, and for a long while that was beer. In
Cannery Row a character who one could tell was a
connoisseur professes that “there’s nothing like that first taste of
beer.” But I have often needed, at the moment of waking, Russian
vodka. There is what is drunk with meals, and in the afternoons that
stretch between them. There is wine some nights, along with spirits,
and after that beer is pleasant again — for then beer makes one
thirsty. There is what is drunk at the end of the night, at the
moment when the day begins anew. It is understood that all this has
left me very little time for writing, and that is exactly as it
should be: writing should remain a rare thing, since one must have
drunk for a long time before finding excellence.

I have wandered extensively in
several great European cities, and I appreciated everything that
deserved it. The catalogue on this subject could be vast. There were
the beers of England, where mild and bitter were mixed in pints; the
big schooners of Munich; and the Irish; and the most classical, the
Czech beer of Pilsen; and the admirable baroquism of the Gueuze
around Brussels, when it had its distinct flavour in each artisanal
brasserie and did not travel well. There were the fruit liqueurs of
Alsace; the rum of Jamaica; the punches, the aquavit of Aalborg, and
the grappa of Turin, cognac, cocktails; the incomparable mezcal of
Mexico. There were all the wines of France, the loveliest coming from
Burgundy; there were the wines of Italy, and especially the Barolos
of Langhe, the Chiantis of Tuscany; there were the wines of Spain,
the Riojas of Old Castille or the Jumilla of Murcia.

I would have had very few illnesses
if alcohol had not in the end brought me some; from insomnia to
vertigo, by way of gout. “Beautiful as the trembling of the hands in
alcoholism,” said Lautréamont. There are mornings that are
stirring but difficult.

“It is better to hide one’s folly,
but that is difficult in debauchery or drunkenness,” thought
Heraclitus. And yet Machiavelli wrote to Francesco Vettori: “Anybody
reading our letters . . . would think that sometimes we are
serious people entirely devoted to great things, that our hearts
cannot conceive any thought that is not honourable and grand. But
then, as they turned the page, we would seem light, inconstant,
lustful, entirely devoted to vanities. And even if someone judges
this way of life shameful, I find it praiseworthy, for we imitate
nature, which is changeable.” Vauvenargues formulated a rule too
often forgotten: “In order to decide that an author contradicts
himself, it must be impossible to conciliate him.”

Moreover, some of my reasons for
drinking are respectable. Like Li Po, I can indeed nobly claim: “For
thirty years, I’ve hidden my fame in taverns.”

The majority of wines, almost all
spirits, and every one of the beers whose memory I have evoked here
have today completely lost their tastes — first on the world market
and then locally — with the progress of industry as well as the
disappearance or economic re-education of the social classes that had
long remained independent of large industrial production, and so too
of the various regulations that now prohibit virtually anything that
is not industrially produced. The bottles, so that they can still be
sold, have faithfully retained their labels; this attention to detail
provides the assurance that one can photograph them as they used to
be, not drink them.

Neither I nor the people who drank
with me have at any moment felt embarrassed by our excesses. “At the
banquet of life” — good guests there, at least — we took a seat
without thinking even for an instant that what we were drinking with
such prodigality would not subsequently be replenished for those who
would come after us. In drinking memory, no one had ever imagined
that he would see drink pass away before the drinker.

IV

“ ’Tis true, Julius Caesar wrote his own
Commentaries; but then that Hero’s Modesty in his Commentaries is
equal to his Bravery: He seems to have undertaken that Work only,
that he might have no Room for Flattery to impose upon future Ages in
the Matter of his History.”

BALTASARGRACIÁN, The
Compleat Gentleman.

I HAVE KNOWNthe world
quite well, then, its history and geography, its scenery and those
who populated it, their various practices and, particularly, “what
sovereignty is, how many kinds there are, how one acquires it, how
one keeps it, how one loses it.”

I have had no need to travel very
far, but I have considered things with a certain seriousness,
according them each time the full measure of the months or years that
they seemed to merit. Most of the time I lived in Paris, exactly in
the triangle defined by the intersections of the rue Saint-Jacques
and the rue Royer-Collard, rue Saint-Martin and rue Greneta, and the
rue du Bac and rue de Commailles. And I have in fact spent my days
and nights in this restricted space and the narrow frontier-margin
that is its immediate extension; most often on its eastern side and
more rarely on its northwestern side.

I never, or hardly ever, would have
left this area, which suited me perfectly, if a few historical
necessities had not obliged me to depart several times. Always
briefly in my youth, when I had to risk some forays abroad in order
further to extend disruption; but later for much longer, when the
city had been sacked and the kind of life that had been led there had
been completely destroyed —which is what happened from 1970
onwards.

I believe that this city was ravaged
a little before all the others because its ever-renewed revolutions
had so worried and shocked the world, and because they had
unfortunately always failed. So we have been punished with a
destruction as complete as that which had been threatened earlier by
the Manifesto of Brunswick or the speech of the Girondist Isnard: in
order to bury so many fearsome memories and the great name of Paris.
(The infamous Isnard, presiding over the Convention in May 1793,
had already had the impudence to announce prematurely: “I say that if
through these incessant insurrections the national representatives
should happen to be attacked — I declare to you, in the name of all
of France, Paris will be
annihilated; you would soon have to search the banks of the Seine to
determine whether this city ever existed.”)

Whoever sees the banks of the Seine
sees our grief: nothing is found there now save the bustling columns
of an anthill of motorized slaves. The historian Guicciardini, who
experienced the end of the freedom of Florence, noted in his
Ricordi: “All cities, all states, all kingdoms are
mortal; everything, whether by nature or by accident, comes to an end
and finishes sooner or later; so a citizen who sees the collapse of
his country should not lament so much the misfortune of the country
and the bad luck that it has encountered this time; rather, he should
mourn his own misfortune; because what happened to the city had to
happen anyway, but the true misfortune was to have been born at the
moment when such a disaster had to take place.”

It could almost be believed, despite
the innumerable earlier testimonies of history and the arts, that I
was the only person to have loved Paris; because, first of all, I saw
no one else react to this question in the repugnant “seventies.” But
subsequently I learned that Louis Chevalier, its old historian, had
published then, without too much being said about it, L’Assassinat de Paris. So we could count at least two righteous
people in the city at the time. I did not want to see any more of the
debasement of Paris. More generally, little importance should be
granted to the opinion of those who condemn something without having
done all that was required to destroy it and, failing that, to prove
always so foreign to it that they still actually had the possibility
of being so.

Chateaubriand pointed out — and
rather precisely, all told: “Of the modern French authors of my time,
I am also the only one whose life is true to his works.” In any case,
I have certainly lived as I have said one should, and this was
perhaps even more unusual among the people of my time, who have all
seemed to believe that they had to live only according to the
instructions of those who direct current economic production and the
power of communication with which it is armed. I have resided in
Italy and Spain, principally in Florence and Seville — in Babylon, as
they said in the Golden Age — but also in other cities that were
still living, and even in the countryside. Thus I enjoyed a few
pleasant years. Much later, when the tide of destruction, pollution
and falsification had conquered the whole surface of the planet, as
well as plunging down nearly to its depths, I could return to the
ruins that remained of Paris, for then nothing better remained
anywhere else. One cannot go into exile in a unified world.

So what did I do during that time? I
did not try too hard to avoid dangerous encounters; and it is even
possible that I cold-bloodedly sought some of them out.

In Italy I was certainly not well
thought of by everyone, but I had the good fortune to meet the
“sfacciate donne
fiorentine” when I lived in
Florence, in the Oltrarno district. There was that little Florentine
who was so graceful. In the evenings she would cross the river to
come to San Frediano. I fell in love very unexpectedly, perhaps
because of her beautiful, bitter smile. I told her, in brief: “Do not
stay silent, for I come before you as a stranger and a traveller.
Grant me some refreshment before I go away and am here no more.” At
that time Italy was once again losing its way: it was necessary to
regain sufficient distance from its prisons, where those who stayed
too long at the revels of Florence ended up.

The young Musset drew attention to
himself long ago for his thoughtless question: “Have you seen in
Barcelona,/an Andalusian with sunburnt breasts?” Well, yes! I’ve had
to say ever since 1980. I played my part — and perhaps my greatest
part — in the follies of Spain. But it was in another country that
that irremediable princess, with her wild beauty and her voice,
appeared. “Mira como vengo
yo” were the truthful words
of the song she sang. That day, we didn’t continue to listen. I loved
that Andalusian for a long time. How long? “A period in proportion to
our vain and meagre span,” said Pascal.

I even stayed in an inaccessible
house surrounded by woods, far from any village, in an extremely
sterile, exhausted mountainous region, deep in a deserted Auvergne. I
spent several winters there. Snow fell for days on end. The wind
piled it up in drifts. Barriers kept it off the road. Despite the
exterior walls, snow accumulated in the courtyard. Logs burned in the
fireplace.

The house seemed to open directly on
to the Milky Way. At night, the nearby stars would shine brilliantly
one moment, and the next be extinguished by the passing mist. And so
too our conversations and our celebrations, our meetings and our
tenacious passions.

It was a land of storms. They would
approach noiselessly at first, announced by the brief passage of a
wind that slithered through the grass or by a series of sudden
flashes on the horizon; then thunder and lightning were unleashed,
and we were bombarded for a long while and from every direction, as
if in a fortress under seige. Just once, at night, I saw lightning
strike near me outside: you could not even see where it had struck;
the whole landscape was equally illuminated for one startling
instant. Nothing in art has seemed to give me this impression of an
irrevocable brilliance, except for the prose that Lautréamont
employed in the programmatic exposition that he called
Poésies. But nothing else: neither Mallarmé’s
blank page, nor Malevich’s white square on a white background, nor
even Goya’s last pictures, where black takes over everything, like
Saturn devouring his children.

Violent winds, which at any moment
could rise from one of three directions, shook the trees. Those on
the moors to the north, more dispersed, bent and shook like ships
surprised at anchor in an unprotected harbour. The compactly grouped
trees that guarded the hill in front of the house supported one
another in their resistance, the first rank breaking the west wind’s
relentless assault. Farther off, the line of the woods disposed in
squares, over the whole half-circle of the hills, evoked the troops
arranged in a chessboard pattern in certain eighteenth-century battle
scenes. And those almost always vain charges sometimes made a breach,
knocking down a rank. Piled-up clouds traversed the sky at a run. A
sudden change of wind could also quickly send them into retreat, with
other clouds launched in their pursuit.

On calm mornings, there were all the
birds of the dawn and the perfect chill of the air, and that dazzling
shade of tender green that came over the trees, in the tremulous
light of the sun rising before them.

The weeks passed imperceptibly. One
day the morning air announced the arrival of autumn. Another time, a
great sweetness in the air, a sweetness you could taste, declared,
like a quick promise always kept, “the spring breeze.”

In regard to someone who has been, as
essentially and continuously as I, a man of streets and cities — one
will thus appreciate the degree to which my preferences will not
overly falsify my judgements — it should be pointed out that the
charm and harmony of these few seasons of grandiose isolation did not
escape me. It was a pleasing and impressive solitude. But in truth I
was not alone: I was with Alice.

In the midwinter nights of 1988, in
the square des Missions Étrangères, an owl would
obstinately repeat his calls, fooled perhaps by the unseasonable
weather. And this unusual run of encounters with the bird of Minerva,
its air of surprise and indignation, did not in the least seem to
constitute an allusion to the imprudent conduct or the various
aberrations of my life. I have never understood in what way it could
have been different, nor how it could have been justified.

V

“As a
scholar and a man of learned education, and in that sense a
gentleman, I may presume to class myself as an unworthy member of
that indefinite body called gentlemen. Partly on the ground I have
assigned, perhaps; partly because, from my having no visible calling
or business . . . I am so classed by my
neighbours. . . .”

THOMAS DEQUINCEY,Confessions of an English
Opium Eater.

A COMBINATION OF circumstances has marked almost everything I
have done with a certain conspiratorial allure. In this very area,
many new professions have been created at great cost with the sole
end of showing what beauty society had recently been able to achieve,
and how it reasoned soundly in all its discourses and all its plans.
Whereas I, without any salary, provided the example of completely
opposite schemes; this has inevitably been badly received. It has
also led me to meet, in several countries, people who were rightly
considered lost. The police watch them. The specialized thought which
can be viewed as the police form of knowledge, expressed itself with
reference to me in 1984 in the Journal du Dimanche of 18 March: “For many police officers,
whether they belong to the crime squad, the DST, or the
Renseignements
généraux, the
most serious trail leads to the entourage of Guy
Debord. . . . The least that can be said is that,
faithful to his legend, Guy Debord has hardly proved talkative.” Even
earlier, in the Nouvel
Observateur of
22 May 1972: “The author of The Society of the Spectacle has always appeared as the discreet but
indisputable head . . . at the centre of the changing
constellation of brilliant conspirators of the Situationist
International, a kind of cold chess player, rigorously leading
. . . the game whose every move he has foreseen.
Surrounding himself with people of talent and goodwill, while keeping
his authority veiled. Then breaking with them with the same
nonchalant virtuosity, manoeuvring his acolytes like naive pawns,
clearing the chessboard move after move, finally emerging as the sole
master, and always dominating the game.”

My sort of mind leads me at first to
be amazed at this, but it must be recognized that many of life’s
experiences only verify and illustrate the most conventional ideas,
which one may have already encountered in numerous books, but without
believing them. Recalling what one has experienced oneself, it is not
necessary to inquire into every detail of the observation never made,
or its astonishing paradox. Thus I owe it to the truth to note,
following others, that the English police seemed the most suspicious
and the most polite, the French police the most dangerously trained
in historical interpretation, the Italian police the most cynical,
the Belgian police the most rustic, the German police the most
arrogant, while it was the Spanish police who proved themselves the
least rational and the most incapable.

For an author who has written with a
certain degree of quality and so knows what it means to speak, it is
generally a sad ordeal when he has to reread and consent to sign his
own answers in a statement for the police judiciaire. First, the text as a whole is directed by
the investigators’ questions, which are usually not mentioned and do
not innocently arise, as they sometimes hope to appear to, from the
simple logical necessities of a precise inquiry or from a clear
understanding. The answers that one was able to formulate are in fact
hardly better than their summary, dictated by the highest-ranking
officer and obviously rewritten with a great deal of awkwardness and
vagueness. If, naturally — but many innocents are unaware of it — it
is imperative to have precisely corrected every detail by which the
thought that one had expressed has been translated with a deplorable
unfaithfulness, it is necessary to give up quickly on having
everything transcribed in the suitable and satisfactory form that one
used spontaneously, for then one would be led to double the number of
those already tiresome hours, which would rid the greatest purist of
the taste for being so to such a degree. So then, I here declare that
my answers to the police should not be included later in my collected
works, because of scruples about the form, and even though I signed
the veracious content without embarrassment.

Having certainly, thanks to one of
the rare positive features of my early education, a sense of
discretion, I have sometimes known the necessity of showing a still
more pronounced discretion. A number of useful habits have thus
become like second nature to me; this I say while ceding nothing to
malicious persons who might be capable of claiming that that could in
no way be distinguished from my nature itself. No matter what the
subject, I have trained myself to be even less interesting whenever I
saw greater chances of being overheard. In some cases, I have also
made appointments or given my views through letters personally
addressed to friends and modestly signed with little-known names that
have figured in the entourage of some famous poets: Colin Decayeux or
Guido Cavalcanti, for example. But it is obvious that I have never
lowered myself to publishing anything at all under a pseudonym,
despite what some hack libellers have sometimes insinuated in the
press, with an extraordinary aplomb, while prudently confining
themselves to the most abstract generalities.

It is permitted, but not desirable,
to wonder where such a predilection to contradict all authorities
could positively lead. “We never pursue things so much as the pursuit
of things”: certainty on this subject has been long established. “One
loves the hunt more than the catch. . . .”

Our era of technicians makes abundant
use of the nominalized adjective “professional”; it seems to believe
that it has found there some kind of guarantee. Of course, if one
contemplates not my emoluments but only my abilities, there can be no
doubt that I have been a very good professional. But in what? Such
will have been my mystery, in the eyes of a blameful world.

Messrs Blin, Chavanne and Drago, who
in 1969 published a Traité du Droit de la
Presse, concluded the chapter
concerning the “Danger des
apologies” with an authority
and experience that felicitously lead me to believe that they should
be accorded a great deal of confidence: “To vindicate a criminal act,
to present it as glorious, meritorious, or lawful can have
considerable persuasive power. Weakwilled individuals who read such
apologies will not only feel absolved in advance if they commit those
acts, but will even see in their commission the opportunity of
becoming important people. The knowledge of criminal psychology shows
the danger of apologies.”

VI

“And when
I think that these people march side by side, on a long and difficult
journey, in order to arrive together at the same place, where they
will run a thousand dangers to achieve a great and noble goal, these
reflections give this picture a meaning that profoundly moves
me.”

CARL VONCLAUSEWITZ,
Letter of
18 September 1806.

I HAVE BEEN very interested in war, in the theoreticians
of its strategy, but also in reminiscences of battles and in the
countless other disruptions history mentions, surface eddies on the
river of time. I am not unaware that war is the domain of danger and
disappointment, perhaps even more so than the other sides of life.
This consideration has not, however, diminished the attraction that I
have felt for it.

And so I have studied the logic of
war. Moreover, I succeded, a long time ago, in presenting the basics
of its movements on a rather simple board game: the forces in
contention and the contradictory necessities imposed on the
operations of each of the two parties. I have played this game and,
in the often difficult conduct of my life, I have utilized lessons
from it — I have also set myself rules of the game for this life, and
I have followed them. The surprises of this Kriegspiel seem inexhaustible; and I fear that this may
well be the only one of my works that anyone will dare acknowledge as
having some value. On the question of whether I have made good use of
such lessons, I will leave it to others to decide.

It must be acknowledged that those of
us who have been able to perform wonders with writing have often
given the least proof of expertise in the command of war. The trials
and tribulations met with on this terrain are now innumerable. During
the retreat from Prague, Captain de Vauvenargues marched along with
troops hurried in the one direction still open. “Hunger and disorder
tramp in their fugitive tracks; night shrouds their steps and death
follows them in silence. . . . Fires lit on the ice
illuminate their last moments; the earth is their fearsome bed.” And
Gondi was distressed to see the regiment that he had raised
about-face quickly on the Pont d’Antony, and to hear this rout
referred to as the “First Corinthians.” And Charles d’Orléans
was in the vanguard in the unfortunate attack at Agincourt, which was
riddled with arrows along its course and broken at its end, where one
could see “all the gentle and chivalrous nobles of France, who were
at least ten to one against the English, be thus defeated.” He was to
remain captive in England for twenty-five years, little appreciationg
on his return the manners of another generation (“The world is bored
with me — and I with it”). And, unfortunately, Thucydides arrived
with the squadron he commanded a few hours too late to prevent the
fall of Amphipolis; he could only ward off one of the many
consequences of the disaster by landing his infantry at Aeion, which
saved the town. Lieutenant von Clausewitz himself, with the fine army
marching on Jena, was far from expecting what would be found
there.

But all the same, at the Battle of
Neerwinden in Royal-Roussillon, Captain de Saint-Simon gallantly took
part in the five charges by the cavalry, which had already been
exposed, a fixed target, to the fire of enemy cannon whose balls
swept away whole files, while the ranks of “the insolent nation” kept
re-forming. And Stendhal, second lieutenant in the 6th Dragoons
Regiment in Italy, captured an Austrian battery. As the Battle of
Lepanto raged on the sea, Cervantes, at the head of twelve men, was
unshakeable in holding the last redoubt of his galley when the Turks
tried to board it. It is said that Archilochus was a professional
soldier. And Dante, when the Florentine cavalry charged at
Campaldino, killed his man there, and still liked to evoke it in the
Purgatorio, Canto V: “And I say to him: What force
of fatality/has taken you so far from Campaldino/that no one’s ever
seen your burial place?”

History is inspiring. If the best
authors, taking part in its struggles, have proved at times less
excellent in this regard than in their writings, history, on the
other hand, has never failed to find people who had the instinct for
the happy turn of phrase to communicate its passions to us. “There is
no more Vendée,” General Westermann wrote to the Convention in
December 1793, after his victory in Savenay. “It died under our
sabre along with its women and children. I have just buried it in the
swamps and woods of Savenay. I have crushed the children under the
hooves of our horses, massacred the women — they, at least, will not
give birth to any more brigands. I have not even one prisoner to
reproach myself for. I have exterminated
everyone. . . . We take no prisoners, for we would
have to give them the bread of liberty, and pity is not
revolutionary.” A few months later, Westermann was to be executed
with the Dantonists, blackened with the name of “The Indulgents.”
Shortly before the insurrection of 10 August 1792, an
officer of the Swiss Guards, the last remaining defenders of the
person of the monarch, wrote a letter sincerely expressing the
sentiments of his comrades: “All of us have said that if any harm
came to the king, and there were not at least 600 red coats
lying at the foot of the king’s stairway, we would be dishonoured.” A
little more than 600 guards were finally killed when the same
Westermann who had first tried to neutralize the soldiers, by
advancing alone among them on the king’s stairway and speaking to
them in German, understood that there was nothing left to do but
launch the attack.

In the Vendée, which still
fought on, a Song to Rally the
Chouans in the Event of a Rout declared just as stubbornly: “We have only
one life to live,/we owe it to honour./That’s the flag we must
follow. . . .” During the Mexican Revolution,
Francisco Villa’s partisans sang: “Of that famous Northern
Division,/only a few of us are left now,/still crossing the
mountains,/finding someone to fight wherever we go.” And the American
volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade sang in 1937: “There’s a valley in
Spain called Jarama/It’s a place that we all know too well,/For ’tis
there that we wasted our manhood/And most of our old age as well.” A
song of the Germans in the Foreign legion rendered a more detached
melancholy: “Anne-Marie, where in the world are you going?/I’m going
to town where the soldiers are.” Montaigne had his quotations; I have
mine. A past marks soldiers, but no future. That is why their songs
can touch us.

Pierre Mac Orlan, in Villes, recalled the attack on Bouchavesne, which
was entrusted to yonug hoodlums serving in the French army, assigned
by law to the African light-infantry battalions: “On the road to
Bapaume, not far from Bouchavesne, where the Joyeux
redeemed their sins in a few hours, climbing up a mound, the mound of
the Berlingots Woods, one caught sight of Picardy and its torn
dress.” On the opposing slopes of the sentence, with a skilful
awkwardness, which this mound overhangs, one recognizes memory and
its superimposed meanings.

Herodotus reports that at the pass of
Thermopylae, where the troops led by Leonidas were annihilated at the
end of their useful holding action, next to the inscriptions that
evoke the hopeless combat of “Four thousand men from the
Peloponnesus” and the Three Hundred who had it said in Sparta that
they lie there, “obedient to its orders,” the seer Megistias is
honoured with a special epitaph: “As a seer, he knew that death was
near — but he refused to leave the Spartan leader.” One does not have
to be a seer to know that there is no position so good that it cannot
be outflanked by much superior forces; it can even be overwhelmed by
a frontal attack. But in certain cases it is good to be indifferent
to this sort of knowledge. The world of war presents at least the
advantage of not leaving room for the silly chatter of optimism. It
is common knowledge that in the end everyone is going to die. No
matter how fine defence may be in everything else, as Pascal more or
less put it, “the last act is bloody.”

What discovery could still be
expected in this domain? The telegram sent by the King of Prussia to
Queen Augusta, on the eve of the Battle of Saint-Privat, sums up most
wars: “The troops performed prodigies of valour against an equally
brave enemy.” Everyone knows the brief text of the order, briskly
relayed by an officer, which sent the Light Brigade to its death on
25 October 1854, at Balaclava: “Lord Raglan wishes the
cavalry to advance rapidly to the front — follow the enemy and try to
prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. . . .” It is
true that the writing is a little imprecise; but no matter what
anyone has said, it is no more obscure or erroneous than a multitude
of plans and orders that have directed historic undertakings to their
uncertain ends or inevitably dire outcomes. It is amusing to see what
superior airs journalistic and academic thinkers put on when it comes
to giving their opinions on what had been military operations. Since
the result is known, they need at least one victory in the field to
refrain from harsh mockery; and so they limit themselves to
observations on the excessive price in blood and the relative limits
of the success achieved, compared to others that, according to them,
were possible that very day by going about it more intelligently.
These thinkers have always listened with a great deal of respect to
the worst visionaries of technology and all the chimeras of the
economy, without even thinking of examining the results.

Masséna was fifty-seven years
old when he said that command wears one out, as he spoke before his
staff when he had been charged with conducting the conquest of
Portugal: “You don’t live twice in our profession, no more so than on
this earth.” Time does not wait. One does not defend Genoa twice; no
one has twice roused Paris to revolt. Xerxes, as his great army was
crossing the Hellespont, formulated in perhaps just one sentence the
first axiom at the base of all strategic thought, when he explained
his tears by saying: “I was thinking about the extreme brevity of
men’s lives, for of the multitude before our eyes, not one man will
still be alive in a hundred years.”

VII

“But if
these Memoirs ever see the light of day, I have no doubt that they
will incite a prodigious revolt . . . and as in the times
in which I wrote, especially most recently, everything tended towards
decadence, confusion, chaos, which have only grown in the meantime,
and since these Memoirs exude nothing but order, rule, truth, fixed
principles, and expose everything that is to the contrary, which
increasingly rules over the most ignorant and with the greatest
possible authority, then the revulsion against this truthful mirror
ought to be general.”

SAINT-SIMON,
Memoirs.

A DESCRIPTION OFThe
Rural Life of England, which
Howitt published in 1840, exhibited a no doubt excessively
generalized satisfaction in concluding that every man who has a
feeling for the pleasures of existence should thank Heaven for having
let him live in such a country at such a time. But, on the contrary,
our era dares not render too emphatically, with regard to the life
that is lived now, the general disgust and the beginnings of terror
that are felt in so many areas. They are felt, but never expressed
before bloody revolts. The reasons for this are simple. The pleasures
of existence have recently been redefined in an authoritarian way —
first in their priorities, and then in their entire substance. And
these authorities who redefined them could just as well decide at any
moment, without having to burden themselves with any other
consideration, which modification could be most lucratively
introduced into the techniques of their manufacture, completely
liberated from the need to please. For the first time, the same
people are the masters of everything that is done and of everything
that is said about it. And so Madness “hath builded her house
. . . on the highest places of the city.”

The only thing proposed to people who
did not enjoy so indisputable and universal a competence was to
submit, without adding the least critical remark, on this question of
their sense of the pleasures of existence — as they had already
elected representatives of their submission everywhere else. And they
have shown, in letting themselves be relieved to these trivialities,
which they have been told are unworthy of their attention, the same
geniality of which they had already given proof by watching, from a
greater distance, life’s remaining glories slip away. When “to be
absolutely modern” has become a special law decreed by a tyrant, what
the honest slave fears more than anything is that he might be
suspected of being behind the times.

Men more knowledgeable than I have
explained very well the origin of what has come to pass:
“Exchange-value could have formed only as an agent of use-value, but
its victory by force of its own arms has created the conditions for
its autonomous rule. Mobilizing all human use and seizing the
monopoly on satisfaction, it has ended up directing use. The process of exchange became identified
with all possible use and has reduced it to its will. Exchange-value
is the condottiere of use-value, which finishes by waging war
for its own advantage.”

“Le monde n’est qu’abusion” [The world is only deception], Villon
summarized in one octosyllable. (It is an octosyllable, even though
nowadays a college graduate would probably know how to recognize only
six syllables in this line.) The general decadence is a means in the
service of the empire of servitude, and it is only as this means that
it is permitted to be called progress.

It should be known that servitude
henceforth truly wants to be loved for itself, and no longer because
it would bring some extrinsic advantage. Previously, it could pass
for a protection; but it no longer protects anything. Servitude does
not try to justify itself now by claiming to have conserved, anywhere
at all, a charm that would be anything other than the sole pleasure
of knowing it.

I will speak later of how certain
phases of another, not very well-known war unfolded: between the
general tendency of social domination in this era and that which,
despite everything, has been able to come and disrupt it, as one
knows.

Although I am a remarkable example of
what this era did not want, knowing what it has wanted does not seem
enough to me to establish my excellence. Swift says, with a great
deal of truthfulness, in the first chapter of his History of the Four Last Years of the
Queen: “Neither shall I
mingle panegyrick or satire with an history intended to inform
posterity, as well as to instruct those of the present age, who may
be ignorant or misled; since facts, truly related, are the best
applauses, or most lasting reproaches.” No one has known better than
Shakespeare how life passes. He finds that “we are such stuff as
dreams are made on.” Calderón came to the same conclusion. I
am at least assured, by the preceding, of having been successful in
conveying the elements that will suffice to make abundantly clear, so
that no sort of mystery or illusion might remain, all that I
am.